NSA ruling wins cheers on Hill

A court ruling against the NSA data-mining programs brought vindication for several senators who have long warned against the agency’s sweeping surveillance powers.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s Monday finding that the NSA’s surveillance programs is likely unconstitutional brought a judicial victory to the legislative quests of Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all strong critics of the NSA’s reach into Americans’ lives.

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They have been fighting an uphill battle against the intelligence community both on and off Capitol Hill, trying to rein in the NSA’s sweeping data collection programs. But on Monday, they found an ally in a Leon, who decided that the NSA programs likely violate the Fourth Amendment and its protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“It is an astounding day when a federal judge says a government surveillance practice would leave James Madison aghast,” Wyden told reporters. “The idea of collecting all these phone records is not inoffensive data collection as some of the proponents have said. It is digital surveillance.”

Wyden said Leon’s decision supports his own conclusions, which he laid out in length in a New Yorker story that chronicled his quest to expose the breadth of the U.S. data collection programs, envisioned to fight to terrorism but which also collect data from millions of unwitting U.S. citizens. And though Wyden’s colleagues don’t yet have the numbers to pass an NSA crackdown bill in the Senate, his coalition is growing.

It includes Republicans like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) as well as Democrats like Heinrich, who joined the Intelligence Committee this year and promptly sided against Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) on the issue of digital government surveillance.

“The judge got it right. I think that we have strayed from what the framers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment and were dealing directly with government overreach,” Heinrich said in an interview.

Chambliss said he found the court ruling “very disturbing” and said that it runs afoul of previous judicial precedent supporting the programs. Asked if the judge’s decision changed his mind about the effectiveness of such programs in protecting the country, Chambliss replied: “Absolutely not.”

The positions of Chambliss and Feinstein mean that a sea change in NSA policy aren’t likely in the Senate anytime soon. But lawmakers of a broad ideological spectrum came down in favor of Leon’s decision on Monday, and there was nary a statement blasted out that defended the NSA or impugned the judge for his decision.

“The NSA phone surveillance program is a blatant abuse of power and an invasion of our privacy. This ruling reminds the federal government that it is not above the law,” Paul said.

“When exposed to the sunlight of constitutional scrutiny, this massive secret surveillance program could not stand,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

And though Congress has yet to rein in the NSA due to opposition from top U.S. intelligence and administration officials, lawmakers saw something important on Monday that they haven’t seen before: Open debate in courts, rather than in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts that approve NSA programs. And that was a clear victory for advocates of effecting change on the NSA.

“Until recently, this debate has been carried out primarily in a secret court in which only one side — the government’s — is represented. With this case, Americans got their day in court,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.).